Two toilet related links today, neither of them particularly serious, but it’s friday after all. First up is Toilet Twinning, an innovative way of raising funds for improving sanitation in poor countries. Around the UK, you often enter a town and find a sign declaring it to be a twin of some roughly equivalent place [...]
Archive | September, 2011
Infographic: how banks cause hunger
Infographic on food speculation from World Development Movement – click to view it full size.
How much aid is good aid?
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the distinction between useful aid and bad aid, prompted by Dambisa Moyo‘s critique of aid. But how much aid is good, and how much is detrimental? That’s a question answered by a new report from ActionAid (pdf). They reckon that out of $120 billion given in 2009, [...]
Today is ecological overshoot day
Today is Earth Overshoot Day, the day on which this year’s resources are used up and we start going into our ecological overdraft again. It’s more of a symbolic day than a scientific one – it’s impossible to put an exact date to it, but it’s an annual reminder that our current levels of consumption [...]
How much of your carbon footprint is government services?
After last week’s post on carbon offsetting, Byron asked for some clarification on the amount of our carbon footprints that can be attributed to government services. Since it’s not information that’s readily available online, I thought it was probably worth re-posting my reply as a separate post. Each of us has a carbon footprint, a [...]
What we learned this week
According to the WHO, three quarters of the medical equipment in developing countries doesn’t work – cue appropriate technology. Australians themselves may hate it, but the Chinese love their new emissions trading scheme. Land grabs still aren’t getting enough attention from the international community. And an eye-opening graphic that suggests there’s a strong case for [...]
Britain’s first local e-currency
Over the last few years, a number of local currencies have launched in the UK, Totnes, Stroud, and Brixton being the most significant. The Brixton pound has now taken it one step further and next week, at its second birthday party, launches as an e-currency. Users will be able to pay by text, making it [...]
Video: Food speculation explained
Second in today’s double-bill of short videos on commodity speculation, this animation is from German NGO World Economy, Ecology and Development. (Here’s the first video if you missed it)
Video: speculation and the price of tortillas
It’s always worth watching the short video investigations from The Ecologist, and Tom Levitt’s report from Mexico is no exception. The price of corn has tripled in the last couple of years, due in part to speculation in the commodities markets. The first video of two about food speculation I’, posting today – here’s the [...]
Sharing is common cents
I didn’t get to take part in Free Money Day, (I’ve been in a hamlet in west Wales for the last week, population 3) but it looks like it started some great conversations. Over 60 different events in 17 different countries, and lots of buzz, even if it turns out that getting strangers to accept [...]
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